I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point.

I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea in this case, but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.

If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.

You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.

Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper?

I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn't write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren't as well understood by the masses.

Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.

> I heartily disagree that anyone should "detect a consensus" from leftists preaching expropriation. That's just an ordinary activity for them.

Have you missed the conservatives who both argue against net neutrality while claiming that Google (and others) are censoring content because they're too big to be just considered one actor (of many)?

Nationalizing a company would definitely be a left-wing endeavor, but to claim that "leftists" are the ones preaching about Googles unchallenged dominance is just misleading.

That's not what bread and circuses means.

That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.

“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”

So, no, this is not the circus part.

The article is an argument over who ought to own and run the circus. The article is also a distraction, on its own, and thus part of a circus.

Granted, I'd completely accept a quote from The Dude as a legitimate response: "Yeah, well you know... that's just, like, your opinion, man."

It is.

> That expression is a cynical look at the relationship of the individual to the State: so long as my belly is full and I am entertained I'm all right Jack.

Wow. You just describe Sweden O.o I'm mighty impressed how this saying fits perfectly into the context of the modern Swedish culture!

Would you please clarify what you mean?

He did briefly touch on how Monsanto was using similar practices in the agriculture business. I think most readers can make the implied connection there.

>>Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.

I think perhaps you should look up what "bread and circus" actually means, because it's not what you think it is.

or does he...

Perhaps like in the matrix where Neo was in his own little mind trap where he was the "One" while the machines still had control.

or inception where your in a dream inside of a dream...

...maybe arguing about this BS is the circus deju to keep people from really getting involved and actually effecting change in the world.

> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point.

They really aren't. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up.

Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies.

IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.

> They really aren't

They really are? The back and forth is tedious.

The questions I have are,

1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?

So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).

The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.

The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.

centralization isn't the problem, bundling is.

advertising with communication.

privacy with contact management

web index with advertising.

content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace.

product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store.

Data storage with advertising

...the list goes one.

I think they need to be forced to integrate with open standards and open contracts.

1. identity management

2. data storage & privacy individual, group, and public level.

3. Data graphs

4. open standards for apis with an api broker

5.

Here's a nice writeup on Stratechery advocating reasonably for #2 and #3 in the context of Facebook. I thought it was a good read:

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.

Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

Google disables accounts, with no notification / justification, if someone's opinion offends them. Again with no justification / warning, they alter search traffic to/away form companies, with the ability to choose winners and looser in the 'free' market. I dont know how true it is, but I heard they were suppressing positive search results and bringing results with soldiers pointing guns to peoples heads during the arab spring to destabilize governments.

Facebook - well zuckerburg's manifesto on deciding whose words are heard or suppressed scares the shit out of me.

On top of all this, the big tech companies are avoiding taxes and concentrating jobs to small geographic areas. They are using their power/capital/lawyers to monopolize their respective markets and I feel we are starting to see the consequences of that more and more

Post on another site then, or post it on your site.

But it doesn't have the audience you'd argue, well that's how new sites gain popularity, because things are seen/said there that exist no where else. And as far as audience goes, the controlled content argument is not new, we've had that for years with TV networks/channels in terms of who had a platform and what entertainment you had to select from.

To take it further, something like YouTube was just cable public access television taken to an extreme. Now YouTube wants to be mainstreamish, so they're largely doing what MTV, or History Channel did in the late 90's, taking off or downplaying the unique niche content that got them noticed and people originally went there for and promoting the mainstream "reality" shows, etc.

Yes, this is the case, yes, this is the natural progression of things when sites become more mainstream, corporate, and focused on revenue (especially advertiser revenue). But this also leaves an opening for someone else to provide a platform for what is lost to go to. YouTube funny enough replaced MTV as the go to to watch music videos, so in a way I guess it was good MTV had a bunch of high rating low common denominator appeal reality shows to lean on when that happened.

The beauty of the Internet is that there will always be the sub-communities and places for people to go to who have other non-mainstream interests or views. FB, Google, etc are now mainstream, but largely that's because they're replacing the media people used to consume over legacy platforms like TV and Radio.

> Amazon sells products at a loss in order to put competitors out of business.

Lower prices are good for consumers.

I agree to an extent, however I think this is just a part of it. The other part is that these companies are these mega corporations that have more money and power than many countries and they aren't accountable to the people but to their owners. And these are the companies that are going to end up inventing stuff like generalized AI. I don't agree with nationalizing them, but I also don't agree with letting them run around unchecked.

I saw a comment years ago and I dearly wish I'd saved it.

Paraphrased it was "large corporation shit on the floor. Of course it did, that's basically their job, the job of government is to supply the rolled up newspaper and occasionally the mop".

It made me laugh in its succinctness.

Corporations don't exist in isolation, they are part of society and should be answerable to that society, the all regulation is bad thing is as annoying as all regulation is good.

In a democracy fundamentally the corporation should answer to the people.

This isn't new, Standard oil is a good example from a century ago.

Are you sure the authors are writing this story out of a genuine heartfelt fear? Do you think the editor who published them shares this genuine fear?

The Graun is ideologically committed to nationalising all the things. It would be noteworthy if they ever called for anything to remain private, let alone be privatised.

Having said that there's a decent case for Google being broken up.

That just isn't true at all

I guess you have some links to pro-privatisation articles in the Graun then?

Or maybe author wants strong reaction, clickbait or dont care. There will be backslash against tech arrogance, sure, but there is no need for it to involve nationalisation.

I agree with your broader point but The Guardian is a consistently far-left, pro-large(r)-government publication, so it actually doesn't take much for them to publish something like this; the suggestion is right up their alley.

Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities.

Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.

DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.

Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal publishing (Facebook)?

Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?

A simple solution is to treat these companies as telcos.

We could learn something from history. See e.g. the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), [1]. And the telecommunications acts, [2], [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

What we should learn from history is that ICC regulation was crippling (nearly destroying the rail industry in the US: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-der...) and the county has been a lot better off since railroads, air freight, airlines, and yes telcos were deregulated.

That is not to say that we can't regulate things we care about (data privacy, competition, etc). But looking with rose-colored lenses at ICC regulation is foolish. It's the worst sort of regulatory regime: where government bureaucrats are in charge of approving/denying the rail ties that go in the ground and how much can be charged for a ride.

Definitely no bias in the take you linked...

Whatever you wanna say about how regulation worked out for trains in the US, the situation in the early era of US rail was not a good one. It was one of the worst monopolies we've seen and was terrible for the workers.

What bias? As far as I can tell, the author has no connection to the rail industry.[1] As to your other point, the fact that early rail monopolies were bad doesn't mean that ICC-style regulation was good. You can have labor protections, antitrust enforcement, and safety regulations without having the government be involved in deciding how much a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee should cost. There is a reason there was a bipartisan effort to get rid of those regulatory regimes in the 1960s-1990s, and why Europe copied those reforms in the 1980s-2000s.

[1] If you're referring to the fact that the article appears in the American Conservative, merely being conservative is not a "bias." In any event, left-leaning organizations like the Brookings Institute have featured similar coverage: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-stagge....

I wouldn't call Brookings left-leaning. Centre-right or better neoliberal.

I agree with your points though, the rail situation in the US is awful. Good regulation is hard to do, especially in a place where regulators typically do not share the interests of the people they are in the service of.

I don't think Europe copying the reforms you mention is necessarily a good endorsement of them. The rail situation in (at least Western) Europe has also become quite bad.

> A simple solution is to treat these companies as telcos.

Woh woh woh. Back the truck up. We're not even treating ISPs as common carriers. I mean, we are, but the FCC is about to reverse that.

If that happens we'll all end up paying more for slower access to limited content. It'll be like going back to when you thought AOL or Prodigy was the internet. Even if Google and Facebook were put under greater government supervision, you wouldn't have many options outside of those anyway.

> we should treat them like utilities.

As these are large organizations involved in a variety of activities, it might be possible to separate the infrastructure parts into a strictly regulated utility. Google Search becoming a utility doesn't have to involve stuff like their hosting services or their hardware products.

It will be hard to get buy-in for an all-or-nothing plan like "Nationalize/Utilitize ${BUSINESS}", because it groups together too much into a single proposition. We "just" need to figure whatever minimum change is needed to protect the infrastructure. I realize this, like most important political problems, doesn't have a trivial solution. It will end up with imperfect compromises that everybody is annoyed with. I'm just suggesting there must be a better, more nuanced way to fix this problem than a Boolean "Convert to utility? (Y/N)".

> but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.

"Europe" is a big place so it's hard to talk in generalities, but this is mostly not true. Europe followed the US's deregulation trend and in many cases European utilities are less regulated than American ones.

The EU electric market is similar to the U.S. As in the US, it is split up into distribution, transmission, and generation components. Distribution tends to be handled through regulated local monopolies or municipal entities, while generation happens in a competitive market: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/59351....

Telecom market structure is roughly similar too. Big telecom companies that were previously state-owned were privatized in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. British Telecom and Deutsche Telecom). The biggest difference probably is that the EU has strong rules requiring wholesale access of "local loops" (the wires into peoples' houses). However, this is a smaller difference in practice than in theory. In the big EU countries, unbundling doesn't apply to cable, http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf. In many EU countries (notably Sweden and Spain, which have among the highest fiber deployment), unbundling doesn't apply to fiber either.

If you want to turn these into utilities, you start with a standardization process that allows the public to utilize them as infrastructure.

Like there is an HTML standard, there would likely be a search standard and a social-network/photo-sharing/messaging-platform standard. People would run their own servers that host their own data that connects to these standards, with other companies creating apps that people can use to connect to them.

And make the standards UX friendly, so that it becomes obvious and intuitive enough to use.

The trouble is that nobody follows the standards. Well, very few do. Not even the browsers are standards compliant.

Do you think we should have regulated AltaVista and MySpace as utilities, way back when? If so, what would this have done to Facebook and Google's prospects? If not, what makes something a utility?

There's not a clear boundary, but it's basically the same as when electric power turned from something-only-a-few-rich-could-afford to a utility. At some point, electric power was important enough that it was deemed necessary to impose tight regulation that ensures its availability under fair prices to all citizens (which is what being a utility means to me).

That analogy makes sense. So the discussion should be around what makes Facebook as important as e.g. electric power.

Personally, I think Facebook is more like a lottery or a tabloid than it is like electric power. Citizens are fine, nay, better off without it.

Most arguments e.g. ITT fail to convince me on the critical-ness of Facebook/Google. Instead, the possible harm they cause is brought forward. That's a serious issue, but I don't think it has bearing on the utility analogy.

Google is undeniably important to people. And mainly because they've squeezed themselves into every part of our online lives. Facebook is less so, though it has become a platform that many businesses rely on.

> Google is undeniably important to people. And mainly because they've squeezed themselves into every part of our online lives. Facebook is less so, though it has become a platform that many businesses rely on.

But both of these are free. I don't see how comparing these to the expense of early electric power makes sense. Title II classification for ISPs is currently under threat and surprisingly not the focus of this article.

In fact, the article doesn't mention net neutrality or title II classification once. It is odd that it discusses "platform" monopolies without mentioning "broadband" monopolies.

Facebook and Google only charge fees if you want to advertise through them. And, it is pretty cheap unless you're trying to control a nationwide or worldwide narrative.

It becomes less clearly undeniable once we separate Google into its constituent parts, though.

Is search a utility? How about email? Webmaster tools for SEM? WiFi thermostats?

It seems unfair to blanket classify Google's offerings as utilities, if many of their products and services are just also-rans.

Again, the concentration of power and the strong competitive position of Google can be problems in themselves, whether or not the products are utilities.

For certain pieces I certainly can make really good arguments.

For example, I can certainly argue that YouTube is a problem.

Google effectively uses search to subsidize YouTube. This chokes off any competitor to YouTube as they simply cannot afford the bandwidth costs (YouTube was hemorrhaging money when Google bought it).

If you forced YouTube to stand on its own, you might actually get some competition to it.

I think we should move back to the model we had at the beginning of the internet era:

1. Universities and government agencies create the protocols and the software.

2. Companies create just the hardware.

3. Infrastructure is run and maintained by the government with the help of companies.

Universities and the government providing all the software doesn't sound like a great situation.

Good luck with the legal work required to patch up Google's physical infrastructure than spans, literally, worldwide. For example, if it owns a cable (or just wavelengths) that connect Asia to Europe, how would you handle that ? It certainly doesn't comply to US territory regulations. Unless of course I'm mistaken which is very likely.

You do realize a cable that connects Asia to Europe could be like 6cm long, right?

It's a stupid example I gave, also sometimes the connection has to take the not shortest route due to legal restrictions. So no, not always.

An undersea cable will have to comply with the regulations of the connected countries. A regulator can just come and disconnect the part that runs through their jurisdiction if laws are broken.

The Guardian is based in the UK where energy, water, transport and communication are all handled by the private sector.

Sort of.

The underlying infrastructure is quasi-nationalised in many cases and the private companies sit on top.

For an example look at the big six (largest electricity providers) they all buy electricity from the same place at the effectively the same price, they don't even maintain large parts of their own infrastructure.

The way it was privatised was the worst of all options.

Same with the railways. The companies Joe public interact with don't own the track etc.

It's a truly British solution, what's the worst way? Let's do that.

This would also make me a lot happier about sharing info with said companies. Right now I avoid their products (the non-open source ones) because they just have too much market share and power, but if a site like Facebook turned non-profit I'd be much happier to use it.

It just sounds like a great idea all around.

Facebook goes "non-profit" -> becomes regulated in terms of privacy/earnings -> competing social network springs up -> is able to advertise and boast features that the "non-profit public" Facebook cannot have due to cost or regulations -> new social network is now the de-facto Facebook, and you're right where you started.

and this is assuming that the whole "lets beg Mr. Zuck to pretty pretty please stop doing that whole business thing and start serving us for free, we'd appreciate it" thing works out.

I'm not at all convinced that there are any substantial new features that would overcome the inertia of lock-in (via one's existing connections).

I mean, G+ couldn't do it, and Google tried damn hard. If they can't do it at their scale, who can?

Honestly I'd be more worried about nation states having access to the information held on Facebook and Google than I would private corporations.

They can force Facebook etc. to hand over the data anyway, so it does not seem like much would change in terms of the threat posed by governments.

True, but I'd rather that process happen publically rather than in secret (as would be the default if the Facebook and Google were nationalised). Not that I'm implying there isn't already secret requests for data (if PRISM is to be believed) but at least with the aforementioned being privately owned there is some chance that unlawful / unjust requests for information can be challenged.

> I'd rather that process happen publically rather than in secret (as would be the default if the Facebook and Google were nationalised).

You're making it appear as through National Security Letters were public, which they very much are not.

It only appears I'm making that conclusion when you selectively quote small passages from my comment. The very next sentence that follows the portion you quoted starts off by saying:

> "Not that I'm implying there isn't already secret requests for data"

I appreciate that you consider it worth reiterating the point about national security since I had only glossed over it. But I don't appreciate you manipulating my comment to suggest that I was ignoring that point entirely when I quite clearly did raise it.

I doubt any forcing is involved. These companies are willing participants in government surveillance.

Nobody said anything about a nation state (in this subthread). Just non-profit and tightly regulated.

True but the topic is about nationalisation so I still felt my point was relevant even if it was tangential to the GPs tangent

The topic is about nationalisation.

That's why we need universities and government agencies to work on federated protocols, just like they did with email in the old days.

The SMTP equivalent for Facebook and Google is HTTP which is a federated protocol. With email anyone can store the content on a centralised server in any format they want. Be that inside an open source RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or a flat text file like Postfix defaults, or a proprietary format like Microsoft Exchange does. And the same is true for the services that Facebook and Google offer.

The issue here isn't federated protocols (though that is something we could benefit from in other domains) but rather the dependance on a centralised archives in the cloud. Most people simply don't care or even aren't aware of self hosting solutions. And those that are aware often choose cloud solutions because it's cheaper and/or less hassle than self-hosting. Federated protocols doesn't fix this (just look at how hard it is to set up a mail server compared to running Google Mail).

Plus in the case of Facebook you have network effects where a social network is only as good as the size of the member base.

Yes, I agree that content silos are a problem.

But with IPFS, [1], (which is a federated protocol) you can "host" a HTML file or video or any content without any difficulty yourself.

I'm not sure if it would be suitable for the functionality in Facebook though (sharing stuff with friends only), sending messages, so that's part of the reason why we need more research.

The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.

[1] https://ipfs.io/

You could host HTML files et al without any difficulty long before IPFS came along. There are plenty of easy to use web hosts out there aimed at the layman for more than 2 decades. I mean that literally as I have none-IT friends that had sites up on Geocities (and it's equivalent) back in the 90s.

However as much as we could argue the differences between IPFS and the plethora of other hosted solutions all day and night, but ultimately it would be a moot argument because as cool as IPFS is - and I do think it's a genuinely interesting platform - it is still only a platform for serving static content. So it's definitely not suitable for Facebook-like functionality. In that regard IPFS is more akin to Amazon S3 than it is Facebook.

> The network effect of Facebook can be mitigated by introducing laws that open up competition, like the telecommunications acts, which opened up the market for telephony.

While I can't see that happening - or at least not inside my professional life time - it is an interesting point. We've seen monopolies split up before and while Facebook is a long way from being a monopoly it would be interesting to see which line they needed to cross before the government stepped in.

> it is still only a platform for serving static content

The name might be slightly misleading (InterPlanetary FileSystem) but IPFS has more functionality that just hosting files. Two that comes to mind is pubsub which enables you to have a distributed publish/subscribe network to send messages globally and "dialing directly to nodes" which enables you to send/receive messages directly to peers without having to use location-based addressing.

While the primitives in IPFS are simple, they enable you to build powerful architectures, such as CRDTs. So it wouldn't be impossible to re-implement something like a social network on top of IPFS.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers working on IPFS

It's a perfectly fine situation for nation-states to have access to such data, because nation-states already have access to everything inside Facebook and Google. In the US, you only need a warrant to access anything inside those companies.

Indeed but at least with a warrant all access is documented on public record. Which has got to be better than already having access to all that data in private. Plus private companies can (and sometimes do) challenge a warrant.

Perhaps it's the online identity part that needs public infrastructure protected by legal constraints? Let the free market piggy-back on top of that platform then. Same thing goes for loyalty cards.

> DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.

Your awareness is wrong. DNS is, by and large, operated by for profit enterprises. Y combinator, for example, uses Amazon Web Services as their DNS provider.

I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too little accountability.

However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from the US government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.

The very thought of this terrifies me.

> I trust all of them more than I trust the US government

Governments don't deserve your trust. The same goes for business. Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates. While public and private use power in different ways, they are both a serious threat when they are allowed to act without regular check on their power. The solution isn't to pick sides. Power needs to be diluted regularly, and that happens when government and business work as checks on each other. It is the conflict itself that keeps power from accumulating.

> Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities?

They already are, in all but name. Remember Prism?

> All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.

That ship already sailed, unfortunately. I agree that this is a terrifying problem, but I'm not sure how to fix it. However, consider this: right now there are effectively no restraints on that power. Nationalizing/utilifying Google et al at least introduces the opportunity to add regulation by bringing the problem into public scrutiny.

>Trusting either is is a terrible idea, because power corrupts wherever it accumulates.

Concentrated power is also concentrated responsibility.

It's the lack of individual power for any one member that makes groups (governments, companies, political organizations, etc) untrustworthy. When nobody feels like they have enough individual power to do what they consider right they also do not feel responsible for doing wrong. They're just doing their jobs.

Maybe nationalization is a bad way to go about it, but these companies are too large, they have too much power over society and society needs to exert power back onto them. So there should be some kind of external oversight when decisions that affect millions of people are being made.

I think governments are inefficient and corrupt, but companies are absolutely free to do as they please when deciding how to change products that affect society. Also, there is much more spying freedom in the private sector. This is why there should be a mechanism to oversee what happens with our data.

You mean like a set of regulations these companies had to comply with? Maybe with panels of ordinary citizens to adjudicate their application, overseen by a professional expert. Maybe we could call these regulations 'laws'.

Largest companies by annual revenue[0]:

    WalMart Stores (US)  - $485.8bn 
    State Grid (China) - $315.1bn
    Sinopec (China) - $267.5bn 
    China Natural Petroleum (China) - $262.6bn
    Toyota Motor (Japan) - $254.7bn
    Volkswagen (Germany) - $240.2bn
    Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands) - $240bn
    Berkshire Hathaway (US) - $223.6bn
    Apple (US) - $215.6bn
    Exxon Mobil (US) - $205bn

None are the big three. Should we nationalize Toyota and Volkswagen also?

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/20/revealed-worl...

Are you more or less forced to buy a Toyota simply because all your friends drive a Toyota? Is the majority of roads exclusive to Toyotas? If you question a business decision of Toyota, or a design of their car, can you then sell said car and purchase one from another brand with minimal impact on your daily life (Other than the fact that you have to sell and buy a car)?

Clearly it's not just about revenue numbers here.

I think nationalising Walmart is a perfectly reasonable idea. Considering issues like the level of access to quality food in poor neighbourhoods in the US and the fact that US government subsidises much of Walmart's labour cost already, it would be a much better deal for the American people on average.

Not really relevant, it's not the revenue that is a problem. It's their massive network effects that are, as the author puts it, platform monopolies.

Walmart, Toyota, Apple, do not have entrenching networks that lead to a monopoly. You can just as easily go to Target, buy a Honda, or get an Android phone

I guess the idea is that each country or region has its own Google, Facebook or Amazon - Not that it all belongs to the US government.

I would also argue that they are US companies first and global companies second. Their main focus is always USA and their spirit is also very American for the good and the bad. Strategy for the rest of the world is made in the USA. All important decision are made in the USA. Most investments are made in the USA and also the profits go to the USA.

This is nor good or bad but the point is that those are not global companies.

According to [1] 75% of Facebook Users are located outside the US. And According to [2] India has more Facebook Users than the US. The statistics differ somehow, though they both should be current, but the point remains: Facebook is very much a global company. I am sure that you can find similar statistics for Google or Amazon.

[1] https://brandongaille.com/facebook-user-statistics-by-countr... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...

I didn't say that their audience is not outside of the USA. Feel free to re-read what I wrote.

Think about it like that. BMW sells most of their cars outside of Germany but still is a German company that operates world wide. And this is very true for most big companies today.

This is such a widespread idea I wonder where it comes from. At least your government (hopefully) is a somewhat democratic institution and is to that extend accountable and is providing standard procedures to make it more accountable if you believe it ought to be.

There's no such thing in Facebook or Google. Managers dictate policy and if you don't like it you can leave/stop using their service.

My government is far more democratic than the US but I still wouldn't trust it with that kind of power.

Democracy is nice and all but the representative democracy most of the world is ruled by puts people who are good at getting elected in power rather than people who are good at running a country. Google/Facebook don't have that problem, their leaders are there on merit rather than their charisma, popularity or the lies they told.

Also, Google/Facebook are very much regulated by data protection authorities in the countries they operate in.

I'm not sure it would be such a huge difference from now, when the US government can go through the NSA to acquire data from internet companies. Surely if you had a document the contents of which you wouldn't want the US government to know, you already wouldn't put it on Google Drive?

But you raise another important point. What happens to all the infrastructure and personnel that Google or Amazon have outside the US? Ireland and the Netherlands probably don't feel the same way about hosting a branch of the US Government as they do about a global corporation, and vice versa the US government wouldn't want the same level of scrutiny from foreign governments that Google does. Would European countries attempt to nationalize their local Facebook datacenters? Would it effectively break those colossi apart along national borders?

I would say there is a difference. Right now my assumption would be that American Law Enforcement could target someone to have access to everything. And they might be able to surveil unencrypted traffic. But I do not think that they are always reading anybodies WhatsApp messages. Nationalized that assumption couldn't be made anymore.

They are american companies first and you should trust them even less because they are open to corruption by the US government.

> All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government. The very thought of this terrifies me.

I hate to tell you this, but that barn door was already left open a long time ago.

If Google and Facebook were nationalized, why would they need to sell ads?

Same reason that BBC Worldwide does.

The same reason the postal service does. They still have to pay the bills.

I could see Facebook and Google move to a subscription-style model. People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option. (Prices should be lower in less developed regions, of course.)

Once freed from the prime directive of collecting increasing amounts of data to improve ad tracking, operating and development costs should be much lower than they are now, too.

> People would easily pay, say, 3$ per month for Facebook and 5$ per month for Google if it was the only option

If people had to pay a monthly fee for search or social media, it would very quickly not be the only option anymore

Where would you prefer the funding to come from?

The current situation is close to what you describe (PRISM, etc...)

Governments have broken up large companies in the past, and that works out pretty well. Why suggest nationalization over that? The article only mentions “huge economies of scale”, but doesn’t do a good job convincing me that there isn’t room for broken up Amazons, Google’s, etc.

On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system.

I know it’s opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with how poorly written it is.

Considering their irresponsible painting of Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption re-key scheme as a "backdoor", I no longer can be surprised by The Guardian's lack of editorial quality.

The author spends a long time talking about how companies are planning to make money (shocking news!) on AI, and then concludes with "What’s the answer? Nationalization!"

But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer.

This article doesn't even make sense.

> For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook’s dominance looked under threat. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate alternative to Facebook.

Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to Facebook.

Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could nationalize, but that's not really Trump's style.

When Ello first arrived, I saw it as a very welcome competitor to Twitter/Facebook, and was using it. The questions of "how will Ello make enough money to survive?" came up. I was one of the vocal supporters of a paid account, as I would gladly pay them $5 a month just to help them continue to exist. In the end they took money from VCs, at which point I promptly stopped using them.

I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my money is largely what killed their traction for me.

Yeah I think I registered on Ello just to get my preferred username if it did become popular (after missing out on early Twitter) and haven't really thought about it until just now

Yeah, I agree. Most of us haven't even heard of it until now…

The sad thing is that I actually trust Google, Amazon and Facebook (maybe less the last two) more than I do the British government. Obviously that can change but at least these giants understand tech. Their response in the Snowdon leaks to being tapped was correct. The UK's response to any perceived threat is to question the validity of core technologies such as encryption.

Nationalisation of the big tech services by government would just lead to pointless tail chasing as the they learn in the slowest possible way that the internet can route around the blockades they wish to implement. Giving the government something like Facebook is akin to giving the reins to some unchecked righteous teen who thinks they know how to make it all "better".

>We’ve only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power.

The article is a mishmash of sensationalism and trending buzzwords.

OK let's accept the argument that said companies are "too big". Why nationalize them? To nationalize a company you first have to ask the question what are the consequences for the nation if company X increases prices/fails/stops offering services? If the answer is not dire, you don't touch them

I'll buy that search is important, but what's the vital utility of google apart from that, e-mail and maps? Android? Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency? I can't buy the argument about "our data". Privacy is important and mishandling of personal data should be severely punished, but that's not an argument for letting the state operate those companies - that's an argument for better laws and enforcement.

And how do you nationalize a globally accessed service with limited physical national presence anyway? This is getting more silly by the minute

There are antitrust/competition laws in every capitalist country, if a company is too big just break it - it won't be the first time or the last. If you think a company mishandles or has privileged access to something it shouldn't (your citizen's data) just punish it and limit its access.

>Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency?

Not a direct answer, but this triggered me to wonder how many relations/connections would be lost because people have no other details of each other than what's on facebook.

Sadly that's true, but the blame for this single point of failure falls entirely on those people. In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have multiple ways to contact people you care about.

I don't think it's fair to individualize the problem in that way. Just like yesterday with our security thread, it's not reasonable to expect every individual to go to the extremes necessary to prevent data leakage. There's plenty of excuses and the one you're most likely to get is "I didn't think it was a problem" or maybe "I have a busy life, how can I be expected to do/know that?"

Wow this guy does not mention taxation and the huge advantage governments bestow upon large companies by making it possible to engineer taxes away, an opportunity much less open to small companies. Instead he wants a merger with the biggest responsibility-shirking enterprise of all: the state!

Imagine there would only be only one car company where you could by good, affordable cars for some reason. Now image this car company would not be an American one. I'd say there were national regulations, taxations and tariffs in about zero seconds.

There are already national regulations and taxes that apply to Google, Facebook and Amazon. Hell, there's a story on the front page right now about that.

Let's do a mental exercise: the US government decides to nationalize those 3 companies.

1) Buying them would require at least 30% over their market caps, so let's say $1.3T for Google, and $1.3T for Amazon and FB combined, which is about 2/3 of the entire US Gov budget, so there's no way the government is paying fair market price for this

2) Since the government isn't paying fair market price, it essentially needs to seize the shares by force and then go through the courts for years to fight it off. Millions loose hundreds of billions of dollars in their ETFs, and their retirement savings take a massive hit

3) Even if the government seizes the shares by force, there are very few actual assets owned by those 3 companies, most of the value is in data, systems, growth expectations, employees, etc.

4) With the government forcibly taking control of those companies, countries around the world would take action and either take control of the local subsidiaries or just detach them from the US company, everything starts breaking down

5) Employees quit em masse, there's nobody able to run the systems, the government either has to arrest employees and force them to work, or simply let all the systems go down one by one. Hiring new people won't make a difference, as the learning curve is massive, and you wouldn't even have access to the systems

6) The products offered by those companies quickly fail, and the former employees open new companies that offer similar products, the government wiped out trillions of dollars from the global economy, a massive economic colapse ensues

7) As the global economy crumbles, the author blames the companies and the employees for not being willing to work for a shitty government job in a gulag with no opportunity for innovation, and refuses to take responsability for his/her stupid idea.

It doesn't take a lot to understand how stupid this idea is. I usually don't like to call things stupid, but whoever came up with this idea put so little critical thinking behind it, that it isn't just bad, it's stupid.

What a terrible idea.

It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I guess the evil can just be assumed?

Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about if or how nationalizing would help solve them.

Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now.

As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the regulations to drive it.

Did he bother thinking about what Google, Facebook and Amazon thought of the idea? Google is the worldwide leader in search because they have an army of the world's brightest engineers working 24/7 on improving their algorithms... Why would those people continue working if you seize their company and tell them they're now public employees? If they wanted to be public employees, don't you think they'd be doing that already? We are, after all, talking about people who have their pick of pretty much any job they want. Google isn't a product that you can bottle up or store in a warehouse. It's made of people. People who might have other opinions.

Most people seem to be evaluating this question on an egalitarian premise: what's best for the greatest number of people? On that premise, taking money from very wealthy people and giving it to others will always seems appealing (even though it destroys wealth).

But let's evaluate it from the premise of justice. By what principle can we remove control of these companies from those who created them? From those who have worked there and earned equity in them? From those who have invested in the public stock in order to fund growth and earn a return? By what principle can a government interfere with a private contract, one that has governed how a group of people work together for 15 or 20 years, and unilaterally break it?

The argument is that the companies have too much power. But what kind of power? Can they take money out of your paycheck without your permission? Can they prevent you from erecting a building on your property without their approval? Can they imprison you for failing to appear at a hearing?

There is a difference between government power and economic power. Government power is the power to compel, and it the source of the power is the army and the police, or, more bluntly, the gun.

Economic power is the power to create. The source of economic power is the value that is offered. Sometimes a business offers something so valuable that people shape their lives around its presence and start to take it for granted. These are the businesses we punish most.

Should we turn economic power into government power? The immediate implication is frightening. All three of these companies have well-staffed legal departments challenging the government's requests for private information about their users. Who will fight those requests when these companies are agencies of the executive office?

The long term implications are devastating. Who will create the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon with the prospect of working 20 years and having it taken by force, as punishment for succeeding too much?

And would a nationalized Google have created a self-driving car? Would a nationalized Amazon have invented AWS? Would a nationalized Facebook invest in high-speed internet for Africa? Nationalization destroys growth.

Economic growth follows economic freedom. The world has experimented many times, and the theory and the experiments agree—Venezuela is only the most recent tragic example. At the root of any other argument is a desire to redistribute wealth.

Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes...

"Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations. Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of stifling innovation."

In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence, Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.

As a non-american, I'd be 100x times more scared of these giants being owned by the US gov. Actually I'd completely stop using the services of the two of them that I still use. I'll take a nice faceless profit driven shady corporation any time over a foreign government.

Heck, what freaks me out the most about Facebook is that they act very unlike any of the classical profit driven corporations... which may mean they have other more dubious interest than "just profit". Profit-drivenness is in a sense "pure" and "fair"... when something is state owned/controlled it becomes infused with ideologies and these are known to make people do way more stupid and cruel things that the thirst for more money (hint: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot and their followers where not profit-driven!)

Is this really leftism or a provocation? Either way it backfires by playing right into the simplistic right narrative of theft and jealousy and makes the left look like clueless out of touch jokers with no solutions for innovation and a weakness for ill thought sledge hammer constraints. It's a disgrace.

The bigger problem is significant gains in western democracy and liberalism are being watered down with serious issues around regulatory capture, surveillance and accountability growing. Or current systems, laws and legislation would have been dealing with some of the privacy and market problems caused by Google, Facebook and Amazon.

The EU is trying but it's not in the US interest to interfere with the growth of these companies for many reasons from surveillance to market domination so they will not meet legislation here.

We'd do better by nationalizing Comcast and Verizon, tbh.

Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned Microsoft in the comments?

Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity, specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications, scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers) Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on mobile.

Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti-trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.

You should look at the Four Horsemen talk by Scott Galloway. Microsoft just doesn't possess the same power and market cap proportional to its age as these three companies. Note, Apple is also not mentioned.

As "googling" becomes the most common way most people obtain information, I believe we do need some means to provide for this need w/o private enterprise, and lots of new regulations to defend the users, e.g. in case of Facebook. Persons' private data has become an acceptable good traded silently behind the scenes. The industry needs to gain a means to maintain the quality of software, and basic software needs must be guaranteed by those who we appoint to furnish us roads, electricity and water. WRT nationalisation, well, nations are slowly becoming obsolete as globalisation progresses, and what is most apt instead is that we engineer a globally distributed system at least for search.

"We need" - Who are WE?

As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone with internet connection.

As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts when governments try to enforce the providers to tap or provide records our of their data centers.

The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving. We need no nationalization over here.

Not really, thanks, but no!

> The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving

You consider mass centralization and being almost exclusively under the control of a few massive companies an "improvement"?

This will evolve and changed over time I believe. But, we are certainly in a far better place than we were 2 decades ago regarding freedom of speech and information availability, aren't we?

By "we" does he mean the UK? How do you nationalise a multinational?

I thought that was funny as well. If anyone's going to be nationalizing them, it'd be the US, and I'd wager that non-US residents would like that even less.

This is the secret reason why the Netherlands is giving all these multinationals a tax deal if they register their companies there.

You know, there's this simplistic view about the left - that it's only interested in taking things that other people have created, forcibly, and redistributing them.

I wonder, where that simplistic view comes from.

One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen

Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.

FB, Google, Amazon should be split on many levels. The companies, the datacenters, the data. Especially the user data. The new system should federated, like email and SMS, with account and user data portability.

There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the betterment of sciences and society.

We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data, ultimately.

I share the sentiment that we are dealing with a new kind of companies that don't fit into our "capitalism 2.0" thinking but I wonder: where are those crazy and capable people trying to compete with them in a realistic way? Probably optimizing ads and investment models. Please don't mention blockchains as a solution to this problem.

I have some very raw ideas about this. For example, I really think that Google search engine is unique and its complexity almost almost irreproducible but back in 2013 I wrote[1] a small piece thinking about layered search engines where web sites, specially the top ranked ones, improve their local search, and subsequent layers improve the global searches. Local searches within a specific site are usually awful. I am thinking of these web sites sharing the search "parameters" so we can integrate these information along the different layers. I find many flaws in this thinking but it is good to start discussing different ideas.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh--YwdP...

I agree that advertising should be nationalised and Facebook is a particularly good target. Advertising makes capitalism more centralized; whoever has the biggest budget gets all the customers. Having worked for both big corporations and small companies in the tech industry, I'm certain that big corporations are less efficient overall; I think that they are successful in spite of their innefficiencies because of their advertising power.

Centralization reduces the number of people who have wealth (increases inequality); there are so few of these people and their money is in such high demand (and they have so much of it) that they are effectively incapable of investing it efficiently - Their investing bandwidth is all used up (they are spammed-out with investment opportunities). If wealth was more spread out, more people could be investors and they would have more time to really think through and consider opportunities and because they would have less money on an individual basis, they would be much more careful about their investment decisions.

Lets assume it would be possible to nationalize Google, Facebook and Amazon.

But by whom? US government?

So a nation should run a global company in everyone's interest? Everyone as in the entire population of the world?

Why would I as a non-US-person use a US government system?

Should I then as a non-US-person have a say in how the US run these companies?

This does not make sense.

I guess next article from Guardian will be like 'We Need to build a global government'.

I believe that the fact that the article doesn't compare the solution of nationalization with the prevalent alternative of breaking-up says all you need to know about the quality of the article.

Hell, it doesn't even mention the alternative, even though it's the prevalent one.

Not sure if that's the right path to take, but I definitely agree something need to be done to add further consumer protections. Many people have a large chunk of their lives tied up tightly into their ecosystems, with no simple way out.

I've been reflecting on the impact of oauth / openid during the last few years. For some people, losing your Facebook or Google account could mean ending up locked out of dozens, if not hundreds, of services! Haven't checked Facebook's TOS, but Google's TOS says they can shut down your account at any time. Considering the size and reach of both, I think they should be required to at least provide a reasonable migration period before fully closing down an end-user's account.

At a minimum you should be able to export your data for some period after account suspension. At the moment are there any cases where they summarily delete everything?

I've been thinking about automating a periodic export but not got round to it. I know they have APIs and services for this under the DLF project but I've not looked into it yet. Does anyone have experience with this?

The scary thing is that you'll find conservatives are going to come on board with this, if you pay attention to ruminations recently. They're very concerned about censorship. I am as well, but I'm too libertarian to want the government to be the solution.

Don't bother. It turned into yet another microblogging echo chamber with nothing but propaganda and RSS newsbot reposts.

The politics of this discussion is really interesting. I think this might be the only substantial policy topic where The (progressive leaning) Guardian and (fairly right-wing) Breitbart[1] both push roughly the same approach.

The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic.

Not sure why Amazon is included in this though..

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...

Nationalizing said companies might sound like a good idea at first but one must wonder if this is indeed for the better.

In theory, we own the Govt. in a democracy but it's often realized that in practice, it is owned by whosoever can afford to lobby ignorant politicians, who often care neither for the profit of public industries, nor for their constituency composed of generic ignoramuses.

This seems reminiscent of how 'communism' came to indicate a crony-capitalistic system with a single worst crony possible - the state itself. I for one don't believe public ownership is the same as being owned by a state agency.

You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S. government.

Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).

If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple solution. One should just stop using them. Why bring politics into it? The users made them what they are, the users can undo it.

How can someone make this argument without considering broadband monopolies? Don't these limit our ability to even access content from the likes of Google, Facebook, or Amazon?

Why should "platform" monopolies be regarded as more important than ISP monopolies?

I'm not trying to say that there aren't platform monopolies. I just don't see the point in making them a higher focus when our ability to even access these platforms is under threat by the current FCC.

I am not opposed to public ownership of these companies per se. Letting them just go on uncontrolled does pose dangers we are just beginning to understand.

But given rhe massive surveillance and largely uncontrolled data hoarding our governments and their intelligence agencies have engaged in, I do not think handing control of Google, Facebook and so forth over to the (any) government is a good idea.

In the long run, we need to do something, bur I think we need to come up with a better idea.

I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries. This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.

So currently, you have a choice not to use google/fb/amazon. If they were to be nationalized (a truly silly idea), you may lose that choice.

This might look like a silly comment, but it really isn't. Let's say FB was nationalised. So now if you want to contact your local government office you do so through Facebook. The library service is accessed through FB. Drivers Licenses and professional certifications are linked to your FB profile as are medical and criminal records.

Government information and services would only be indexed in Google. Amazon would become a branch of the postal service and used to deliver passports and driving licenses. In practice you'd hardly be able to function without using them.

Don't know about other countries, but at least in Lithuania there are laws against such scenarios.

Sure, but in a scenario where the government was so interventionist and controlling that it nationalised a search engine, social engine and retailer how likely is it that such laws would stay on the books?

Nonsense. How can any democratic government force to use Google search, post pics in Facebook or buy from Amazon?

By making the government services only accessible, discoverable, and provisioned by those companies, maybe?

Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.

Steve Bannon proposed a fairly similar idea: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon...

You think the Guardian is communist?

Haha, it's a left-of centre paper. They are not even close to genuinely socialist publication like the The Socialist or the Morning Star, which if you read I imagine would give you a heart attack.

Do you think the Daily Mail is a moderate publication?

I find the ideas people have of left and right so pointless and hilarious. It's just childish sports team politics.

If the current state is 0, nationalization is 10. Maybe we should look for 5. Something like a law that requires customer generated content to be accessible via API, and allows customers to PERMANENTLY delete data they've generated, the code, and data can be subject to random audits. Companies will only be subject to the rules if their customer numbers are > x. Or something similar to that.

Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating) how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free" services.

What if we had tax brackets for corporations, as we do for individuals? Tie them to market share? As market share goes up, so does the tax rate.

No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also have the authority to put me in jail.

That misses an even more important point:

At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure. It is not so much about all these companies, it is more about being able to keep the things you bought after these services reach their inevitable deaths, as no company survives forever.

> At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure.

Why? Public infrastructure like sewer, or roads, is tightly coupled with the fact that it's close to impossible to gain physical land/space to build a second one. AWS/Azure on the other hand neither blocking you from accessing the land nor implemented any regulatory capture to prohibit you from building your own version of cloud infrastructure.

Facebook in particular should really be governed by its users, whether that's indirectly under the public ownership of a democratic state, or directly through some built-in form of democratic governance. Nobody should have so much power without some form of accountability.

People had voted to give them this power, by signing up to use the services. They are free to leave any time.

I guess Netflix didn't make the cut - even though its the N in "FANG"... Maybe the hype around Netflix is overblown. After all, Google has Youtube and Amazon has Prime Video which probably give Netflix a run for its money.

So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization?

How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?

Why don't we just nationalize the compute power? There is a billion dollar barrier to entry to offer services like Youtube for free. Nobody is going to do it because they don't have a giant Ad company to subsidize it.

Why nationalize what we can distribute? There is no reason a future youtube has to be centralized and many good reasons that it shouldn't be.

I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that.

"Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that."

A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions tracked through the user’s Google account, and proprietary image-recognition technologies. It’s hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Google.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Facebook.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Amazon.

In 4 years, substitute your own -- no thanks.

No offense, Nick Srnicek, but please keep the authoritarianism on that side of the pond.

Nationalizing doesn't mean the decisions won't be for the benefit of a single person, a single person can manipulate them regardless, and the people will support it.

What would happen to those companies if nationalized? I'm pretty sure most googlers et Al don't want to be government employees and would quit immediately.

Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.

Or, I think the other way is more sensible or probably already in motion -- we need let Google, Facebook and Amazon govern.

I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal possessions and primary residence.

We're coming for your toothbrush, 0xbear.

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Who is John Galt? (I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it's so fitting here.)

That's a really terrible comparison, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

which nation?

perhaps, instead, we need to tokenize them:

https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the-enterprise-23d51baf...

If you nationalise Google and Amazon, say good bye to innovation.

We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.

The answer is no.

You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse

I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.

>From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.

Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?

We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.

The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.

In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself.

All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.

This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.

Then fund a public option. Better yet, make the public option a distributed protocol. Then no seizures of private property, laws prohibiting private enterprise, or internet firewalls to prevent foreign service providers from rendering their service to local residents, would be needed.

> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why.

Uh... no offense intended, that's a failure of your comprehension abilities, and not my responsibility to satisfy. Your confusion amounts to "why is the sky blue?"

Because it's blue, Billy. Because it's blue.

Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization. Technically they are not nationalized, but since they have all kinds of requirements, including needing to apply for rate changes, they aren't exactly normal, either. And if you don't have control of your prices, do you really have a capitalistic business?

But aside from that, 3 people at Google get to effectively dictate what the world will see on the Internet via the top 10 on the search. 1 guy at Facebook gets to dictate what is on my Facebook page. (I certainly don't get any choice in the matter, beyond banning people) This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does? Might a free society decide that it is in the society's best interest to have social media be governed by elected officials, and to not be scientifically designed (via A/B testing) to be addictive?

> Regulation, e.g. of utilities, in the in U.S. is sort of a form of nationalization.

That's the example I had in mind when writing my comment. The utilities WERE nationalized, however they were de-regulated in recent years, and the market has not really recovered from when they were handed government endorsed monopolies.

>This sounds a lot like a dictatorship, and is this what a free society does?

Rediculous, nobody is forcing you to use Google or Facebook.

Nobody's forcing in the sense of directly threatening you if you don't use Google or Facebook, that is true.

But: (a) particularly with regards to social networking, the social pressure to use walled-garden sites like Facebook can be very, very strong (b) if you're a Normal Person(tm), it can be hard to know what else to do other than use the same services that everyone else uses and that are being actively marketed to you.

Sure, at the individual level, using Google and Facebook services (as I myself do) is still a voluntary, consensual transaction, but there may well be societal-level effects that look fairly close to those of traditional monopolies.

It's extremely difficult for a regular user to use the web without bouncing into something provided by one of those two groups.

Agreed 100%.

Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized?

And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.

> Does this mean if you ever built a company, and it gets too big, it will get nationalized?

Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies.

> And what will keep the law from evolving to nationalizing slightly smaller businesses as time goes.

That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?

> Why not? I guess it also has to provide some important infrastructure for other companies.

there are so many reasons it would literally fill hours of political philosophy and economics debate.

and has. These debates have been had. At length, and for many years.

> That's a slippery slope argument. Do you want to nationalize nothing?

I meant where do we draw the line?

We're already drawing a line since some things are already nationalized. We'd just need to move it.

> First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do.

Sure it is.

America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

> America does not hold a monopoly on freedom.

If you spend any real time exploring the concept of freedom and how to measure it, America is in fact the most free nation in the world.

That doesn't mean America holds a monopoly on freedom, it means America is setting the example that others follow, and will continue to until another nation offers it's citizens quantifiably more freedom than America does. And examining the current geo-political climates, that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Yeah, it's total nonsense.

The current government in my state won on a platform of not privatising the main electrical utility.

Nah.

Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.